This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.
And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.
Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I'm learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on....
I mostly just use tty. I hit "startx i3" if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)
I can't play videos though, that's the one major thing it can't do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.
BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?
btop makes the dedicated gpu turn on, wasting energy and disrupting its power saving. yes, this can not be disabled in btop, so it happily shows no load on the gpu. gee, thanks.